Tanj, this means we must re-start the time loop to read the new cultural material!

Stephen having grown concerned with his ability to recall and restate interesting events from his life for his friends amusement and his own reflection concocted at a plan to produce stories of reduced scope which could be presented as a single sentence and this particular tale was his first example.

Since the airline clerk tagged my id as expired then the dmv tester declared my knowledge insufficient, I return for retesting after reacquainting myself with triangles, circles, dashed yellow lines and other signs of the roadway resulting in tapgood, tapgood, tapvery good, tapoops, tapok, tapalright, tapyes, tapgood and finally tap--exhale, passed, roadworthy and no longer expired.

A bright yellow can of yellow corn would help the kids feel better about the dark brown emptiness of the kitchen cabinets and the food pantry would give her a sack of groceries but the day is grey, the cupboards will soon be bare again and she'd have to dress and go across town so maybe she'll (yes I think she will) distract herself and deal with it later.

On her way to work Thursday, Evelyn stopped at the station advertising the highest price gasoline, pulled up next to the third pump, got out of the car locking all the doors behind her, and walked away from it, never to be seen again.

The sales guy circled three times calling out: once 'looking for something special", twice "you know we don't work on commission", and then "can't I help" as I wandered amongst the shelves of usb storage devices finally I answered back: blah blah data moving blah Linux off he flew: "well Linux can't help you there."

"Excuse me, sir," Stella said into the intercom, "Michael Moore is in the lobby with a camera crew, and I quit."

On Saturday, Bruce Willis sat in front of the TV in a seedy bar and flipped through 150 channels five times (three up, two down) and then threw the remote down, remarking bitterly to the barkeep, "there's nothing good on, damn that Harlan Ellison."

She says, â€œif itâ€™s Hells Hammers, I donâ€™t want to live,â€ meaning Alzheimers but I don't argue, I say, â€œI donâ€™t think they really knowâ€ which is true, if obfuscating some, and at last I say, â€œI will go get the doctor's results if you really want to read them,â€ and she looks at me, finally, looks me right in the eye for the first time in days and says, â€œNo, I guess I donâ€™t.â€

Busy afternoon at the secondhand store, Mennonites and Mexicans and motorcycle mamas looking for bargains, and here comes a pale soft middle-aged man to consign the considerable detritus of his mother's life.

At the grocery store a blond and blue-eyed and slightly familiar man makes deliberate eye contact once, twice, a third time, silently demanding "remember me" but I fail in my identification and courage and pass out of the door untouched by his nostalgia but obsessing on my own, "who was that?"

He thanked me in order to criticize everyone else who worked here, showing the merest hint of his burning resentment of everyone who had hindered him throughout his life.

She hung a sparkly crystal in the window to cheer herself up, and it did, briefly, and she added a pretty dish on the endtable in which she set lavender-scented candles, breathing in the aroma as she read a book of new-age inspiration, and she set polished rocks and crystals around the candles and stacked each self-help book on the bottom shelf as she finished reading and returned to her disappointing life with increased anger and bitterness.

Lost in thought, while reading ''A Fan's Notes, David awoke from his fictional reverie, to prematurely jump off the bus blocks from his destination, proving definitively his distractable nature, and penchant for walking.

Time passes; money fails.

She has a box of seed packets, Russian Mammoth sunflowers, monkeyflowers, Irish moss, and others that captured her with catalog photos or names, ordered a few each spring for the past three years that she has not yet planted in the beds she has not yet dug out, and weeds overtake the back yard while her colorful dreams lie dormant.

In the end, it was the light that Warren missed the most; the play of dappled light through leaves, the aged gold of sunset after storm, the fragile dawns of winter morns, these were things that this lifer's cell could ill transmit.

What did he mean by that? Esther pondered, shuffling through the million possible meanings, wondering if he'd meant to hurt her so painfully, and playing over and over in her head the exact tone of his voice as he'd said, "Okay by me."

For some time, I've been trying to come up with one sentence to express what it's like running a pretty heavily trafficked web-site, a frantic combination of a greedy need for attention, a fevered juggling of tomatoes, and an abject terror of scrutiny, when I realized somebody already has written the perfect one: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Yellow streaks of lightning stabbed down in the periphery of his vision, paw prints of rain spattered on the windshield as they traveled northwards and the radio issued warnings of hail and severe thunderstorms, but the sky grew pale gray between two pillars of streaking rain and a lintel of roiling clouds and they sped into bright blue skies.

As he reached around her to open the door, the inner flesh of his upper arm brushed her shoulder blade and he said, too loudly, "this will be your office."

Too often left alone as a child, as an adult he grew adept at wooing acquaintances to serve as ready audiences to amuse with his anecdotes and quips, and as he grew older and developed a sort of harmless silly uncle charm, he had fewer occasions to jettison some woman who had misread his charming overtures as the first steps in a more serious courtship and found more who gladly accepted as little as he had to offer.

I find that my perceived shyness or coolness has developed from an attempt to hide the more despicable pieces of my character from the world, rather than a fear or disdain of the world; can this be true of all shy or cool people?